I "beat" it. I got the Endgame trophy.
So... Having been playing it for a while this type of ending didn't come as a shock or surprise, but I'm still trying to understand it, or make sense of it.
Right off the bat, this game lures you in with its beautiful art direction, it follows with some very simple puzzles, and then let's your own curiosity do the rest.
As you progress, you find snippets of philosophy pertaining to language, existentialism, theology, learning about the world, understanding the nature of the universe, all via very different and diverse approaches (the arts, the sciences, the natural human intellect, the fundamental laws of Western physics, Zen...), which definitely helps to understand the game (and its analogy, I suppose) if you have already some degree of knowledge about them.
I'm really not as well versed in physics or theology or Zen/Buddhism as I'd wish to properly understand all of what the game threw at me; and I'm certainly not as brainy, or as readily receptive, of deep philosophical thought as I was when I dabbled in it in college and high school.
But, I did manage to put two and two together from the videos and audio quotes.
It's hard to establish a through line, thematically, for this game, to get a better understanding of what it's trying to say. The only thing apparent to me based on my findings (audiotapes, vídeos, the puzzles themselves, the nature of the island, etc...) is that it's aware that it is a game, and what that entails. It knows it's an amalgam of art and science, and that games are inherently very effective learning tools; visually, logically, linguistically, games have an intrinsic power to teach the player something.
And so does the world and universe we live in. There's a nice little parallel to be drawn between humanity's quest for knowledge and the player's own little scientific endeavours of deciphering the island's riddles. I, as the visiting player in this virtual garden of Eden, have about as many chances of inductively inferring more about my hosts through the challenges and questions they prepared for me as we do (as a species) about the true nature of the universe simply from the questions and answers we find as we discover more of it.
The game is very careful about skirting the topic of creationism or intelligent design by not throwing down the question of "why I am here?" (playing the game, etc). It's all posited as a simple desire to learn more. The innate curiosity of the human mind, and the dilemmas that arise once that intellect develops enough that the tools available by which to gain knowledge are insufficient, or the answers themselves are insufficient. It's about being unafraid to come out empty handed, and about not having any preconceived notions of the answers you're gonna get, if any, at the end of your experiments.
Really, really neat game. I'm certainly not done with it, much less thinking about it.
Holy hell...
